JK 

'iSSk PATRIOTISM 



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DELIVERED BEFORE 



THE PHI BETA KAPPA 



OF HARVARD COLLEGE, COMMENCEMENT, 1900. 



BY 

WILLIAM EVERETT. 



PEACE ASSOCIATION OF FRIENDS, 

20 SOUTH TWELFTH STREET, 

PHILADELPHIA. 

1 901. 




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PATRIOTISM 



Hn ©ration 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



THE PHI BETA KAPPA 



OF HARVARD COLLEGE, COMMENCEMENT, 1900. 



BY 

WILLIAM EVERETT. 



PEACE ASSOCIATION OF FRIENDS, 

20 SOUTH TWELFTH STREET, 

PHILADELPHIA. 

1 90 1. 




COPYRIGHTED 

BY WILLIAM EVERETT 

I9OO 



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j.B. Haines 
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ORATION. 



I do not see how any one can rise on this occasion with- 
out trembling. It has been illustrated by too many dis- 
tinguished names, it has brought forth too many striking 
sentiments, not to give every orator the certainty that he will 
fall short of its traditions and the fear that he will do so 
disastrously. But of one thing I am sure : it behooves the 
speaker to-day to be candid. No elegant or inflated com- 
monplaces, concealing one's real sentiment by the excuse 
of academic dignity or courtesy, ought to sully the honesty 
with which brethren speak to each other. The first, the 
only aim, of every university, is the investigation and propa- 
gation of truth, — truth in the convictions and truth in the 
utterance. 

My very first knowledge of the Phi Beta Kappa dates 
back to early childhood. In the year 1846 I was present at 
a portion of the Commencement exercises, w T hen the parts 
were sustained by Francis James Child, George Martin 
Lane, Charles Eliot Norton, and George Frisbie Hoar. 
Those exercises were followed by a Commencement dinner, 
whose good cheer proved too much for a boy not yet seven 
years old. It was a dinner at home : no one ever wanted to 
eat too much at the official Commencement dinner. I heard, 
therefore, at my bedside, the next day, the tale of Phi Beta 
Kappa, — how Charles Sumner had held his audience for 
two hours, relating the achievements of four Harvard grad- 
uates who had lately died, Pickering, Story, Allston, and 
Channing; winding up with the magnificent peroration, 
transferred, I believe, from an earlier address, in which he 
appealed so earnestly for peace, as the duty of our time, 
and answered Burke's lament that the age of chivalry had 



gone by the declaration that the age of humanity had come, 
that the coming time should take its name not from the 
horse, but from man. I cannot even think of Phi Beta with- 
out these names and these thoughts ringing in my ears and 
almost dictating my words. 

It seems to me that an orator can hardly go wrong if he 
holds fast to our motto, Philosophy the Guide, or, rather, 
the Sailing Master of Life. There is little doubt that, when 
this motto was first taken by a secret fraternity, "veiled in 
the obscurity of a learned language/' it meant that philoso- 
phy which rejects revelation, — the philosophy of the ency- 
clopaedists of France. Accordingly, when the veil was 
taken away from the mystic characters Phi Beta Kappa, it 
was declared that philosophy included religion. How many 
who accept membership in it to-day direct their voyage of 
life by philosophy or religion either, it might not be safe to 
say. It cannot, however, be wrong, whatever our subject is, 
to steer our way in it with her at the helm. 

I am not going to plunge into a discussion of what phi- 
losophy means. It has been used to mean many things, and 
to some it means nothing at all.*"When Wackford Squeers, 
who sixty years ago we all knew was of the immortals and 
who is now in danger of being forgotten, was asked by any 
parent a question in some occult branch of study, like trigo- 
nometry, he was wont to answer, "Sir, are you a philoso- 
pher ?" And to the invariable negative he would then reply, 
"Ah! then I can't explain it to you." As one of Wackford 
Squeer's humblest successors, I feel there is something not 
absurd in his counter-question, when I meet what are called 
practical men discussing what they call the practical prob- 
lems of life. 

He who, whether decked with blue and pink ribbons or 
not, steers his course with philosophy as his guide, ap- 
proaches all life's problems in another temper and another 
spirit, he is working by other roads to other ends, than his 
who is guided by the passions and worships the idols of the 
hour. Philosophy has different meanings for different men ; 



but the gulf is boundless between those who accept it with 
any meaning and those who know it not, or know it only as 
an oJ>jtct of patronage or scorn. 

I/^T he philosopher walks by principle, not merely by inter- 
est or passion ; by the past and the future, not merely by the 
present; by the unseen and the eternal, not merely by the 
seen and temporal ; by law, and not only by accident. It is 
not, as sometimes fancied, that he does not see and, seeing, 
does not heed these things. He does not, as Plato bids him. 
turn his back on what this world show r s. He meets im- 
mediate duties; he lives with contemporary men; he deals 
with existing demands. But he does all this by the light and 
guidance of rules of which the servant of time and place 
knows nothing. 

I claim for this the assent of all my brothers here as an 
intellectual fact ; but I desire at the outset of what I say to 
rouse your thoughts to it as the dictate of emotion and of 
conscience. Philosophy, the study of causes in their deepest 
effects, beginning with the true use of terms and proceed- 
ing by sound reasoning, has the power to transmute and 
sanctify the most commanplace transactions, the most hack- 
neyed words. The master of all philosophy began his work- 
by forcing his contemporaries to define the commonest sub- 
jects of conversation. I would, as his follower, ask you to 
apply that method to one of the favorite watchwords, one 
of the pressing duties of to-day, and see if philosophy has 
not something to define and correct in a field where her sway 
is scarcely admitted. 

You cannot talk for ten minutes on any of what are 
rightly held to be the great interests of life without feeling 
how loosely we use their names. We seem not to be dealing 
with sterling coin, which has the same value everywhere and 
always, but with counters that, passing with a conventional 
value here and now, are worthless when we come to some 
great public or private crisis. Education, business, amuse- 
ment, art, literature, science, home, comfort, society, poli- 
tics, patriotism, religion, — how many men who use these 



words have any true conception of their force ? How many 
simply mean that form of education, that line of business, 
that sect in religion, that party in politics, to which they are 
accustomed? How many are led by this loose yet limited 
use of words into equally loose and equally narrow ways of 
action ? How many need a Socrates to walk through the 
streets and force them to define their terms? And how 
many, if he did appear again, would be ready to kill him for 
corrupting the youth, and holding to a God different from 
those the country worships? V 

Patriotism — love of country, devotion to the land that 
bore us — is pressed upon us now as paramount to every 
other notion in its claims on head, hand and heart. It is 
pictured to us not merely as an amiable and inspiring emo- 
tion, but as a paramount duty, which is to sweep every 
other out of the way. The thought cannot be put in loftier 
or more comprehensive words than by Cicero: Cari sunt 
parentes, cari liberi, cari familiares, propinqui; scd omnes 
omnium caritates una patria complexa est. "Dear are par- 
ents, dear are children, clear are friends and relations; but 
all affections to all men are embraced in country alone." 
The Greek, the Roman, the Frenchman, the German, talks 
about "fatherland"; and we are beginning to copy them, 
though to my ear the English "mother country" is far more 
tender and true. 

Cicero follows up his words by saying that for her no 
true son would, if need be, hesitate to die. And his words, 
themselves an echo of what the poets and orators whose 
heir he was had repeated again and again, have been re- 
echoed and reiterated in many ages since he bowed his neck 
to the sword of his country's enemy. 

But to give life for their country is the least part of what 
men have been willing to do for her. Human life has often 
seemed a very trifling possession, to be exposed cheaply in 
all sorts of useless risks and feuds. It has been the cheerful 
sacrifice of the things that make life worth living, the eager 
endurance of thing's far worse than death, which show the 



mighty power which love of country holds over the entire 
being of men. Wealth that Croesus might have envied has 
been poured at the feet of our mother, and sacrifices taken 
up which Saint Francis never knew. Ease and luxury, re- 
fined company and cultivated employment, have been re- 
jected for the hardships and suffering of the camp ; the sym- 
pathy and idolatry of home have been abandoned for the 
tenfold hardships and sufferings of a political career; and, 
at the age when we can offer neither life nor living as of any 
value to one's country, those children and grandchildren 
which were to have been the old man's and the old woman's 
solace are freely sent forth in the cause of the country, which 
will send back nothing but a sword and cap to be hung on 
the wall, and never be worn by living man again. 

Such are the sacrifices men have cheerfully made for the 
existence, the honor, the prosperity of their country. But 
perhaps the power of patriotism is shown more strongly in 
what it makes them do than in what it makes them give up. 
You know how many men have been, as it were, born again 
by the thought that they might illustrate the name and swell 
the force of their country, achieving what they never would 
have aroused themselves to do for themselves alone. I do 
not mean the feats of military courage and strategy, which 
are generally talked of as the sum of patriotic endeavor. I 
recollect in our war being told by a very well-known soldier, 
who is now a very well-known civilian, that it was conceited 
for me or any other man to think that in time of war he 
could serve his country in any way but in the ranks. But, 
in fact, every art and every science has won triumphs under 
the stress of patriotism that it has hardly known in less 
enthusiastic days. The glow that runs through every line of 
Sophocles and Virgil, as they sung the glories of Athens and 
Rome, is reflected in the song of our own bards from 
Spenser and Shakespeare to this hour ; the rush and sweep 
of Demosthenes and Cicero, dwelling on the triumphs and 
duties of their native lands, are only the harbingers of Burke 
and Webster on the like themes; the beauty into which Bra- 



mante and Angelo poured all their souls to adorn their 
beloved Florence was lavished under no other impulse than 
that which set all the science of France working to relieve 
her agriculture and manufactures from the pressure laid 
upon her by the strange vicissitudes of her Revolution. 

Not all this enthusiasm has succeeded: there have been 
patriotic blunders as well as patriotic triumphs ; but still it 
stands true that men are spurred on to make the best of 
themselves in the days when love of country glowed strong- 
est in their hearts. It would seem as if all citizens poured 
their individual affections and devotions into one Superior 
Lake, from which they all burst in one Niagara of patriot- 
ism. 

I am ashamed, however, to press such a commonplace 
proposition before this audience and in this place, where the 
walls are as redolent of love of country as Faneuil Hall 
itself. The question is if philosophy, our chosen guide of 
life, has anything to say of this same love of country, — if 
she brings that under her rule, as she does so much else of 
life, supplementing, curtailing, correcting, — or whether 
patriotism may bid defiance to philosophy, claiming her sub- 
mission as she claims the submission of every other human 
interest, and bidding her yield and be absorbed, or stand off 
and depart to her visionary Utopia, where the claims of 
practical duty and natural sentiment do not seek to follow 
her. 

For, indeed, we are told now that patriotism is not merely 
a generous and laudable emotion, but a paramount and over- 
whelming duty, to which everything else which men have 
called duties must give way. If a monarch, a statesman, a 
soldier, stands forth pre-eminent in exalting the name or 
spreading the bounds of his country, he is a patriot; and 
that is enough. 

Such a leader may be as perjured and blasphemous as 
Frederic, or as brutal and stupid as his father ; he may be as 
faithless and mean as Marlborough, or as dissolute and 
bloody as Julius Gesar; he may trample on every right of 



independent nations and drive his countrymen to the sham- 
bles like Napoleon ; he may be as corrupt as Walpole and as 
wayward as Chatham; he may be destitute of every spark 
of culture or may prostitute the gifts of the Muses to the 
basest ends; he may have, in short, all manner of vices, 
crimes, or defects. But, if he is true to his country, if he is 
her faithful standard-bearer, if he strives to set and keep 
her high above her rivals, he is right, a worthy patriot. And, 
if he seems lukewarm in her cause, if, however wise and 
good and accomplished he may be in all other relations, he 
fails to work with all his heart and soul to maintain her 
position among the nations, he must be stamped with fail- 
ure, if not with curse. 

For the plain citizen, who does not claim to be a leader 
in peace or war, the duty is stillxlearer. He must stand by 
his country, according to what those who have her destiny 
in their control decide is her proper course. In war or in 
peace, he is to have but one watchword. In peace, indeed, 
his patriotic duty will chiefly be shown by obeying existing 
laws, wherever they may strike, even as Socrates rejected 
all thought of evading the unjust, stupid, and malignant 
sentence that took his life. But it is not thought incon- 
sistent with that true love of country to let one's opinions 
be known about those laws, and about the good of the coun- 
try in general, in time of peace. In a free land like ours, 
every citizen is expected to be ready with voice and vote to 
do his part in correcting what is amiss, in protesting against 
bad laws, and, as far as he may, defeating bad men whom he 
believes to be seeking his country's ruin. Nay, a citizen of 
a free country who did not so criticise would be held to be 
derelict to that highest duty which free lands, differing from 
slavish despotisms, impose upon their sons. 

But in time of war we are told that all this is changed. 
As soon as our country is arrayed against another under 
arms, every loyal son has nothing to do but to support her 
armies to victory. He may desire peace; but it must be 
"peace with honor/' whatever that phrase of the greatest 



IO 



charlatan of modern times may mean. He must not ques- 
tion the justice or the expediency of the war : he must either 
fight himself or encourage others to fight. Criticism of the 
management of the war may be allowable: of the fact of 
the war, it is treason. And the word for the patriot is, "Our 
country, right or wrong." 

Right here, then, as I conceive it, philosophy raises her 
warning finger before the passionate enthusiast, and says, 
"Hold !" in the name of higher thought, of deeper law, of 
more serious principle, to which every man here, every child 
of Harvard, every brother of this society, is bound to listen. 
Philosophy says, "Hold!" with the terror of the voice with- 
in, with the majesty of the voice from above, to Americans 
now ;« and, with the spirit of Socrates returning to earth, it 
bids them know what they mean by the words they use, or 
they may be crowning as a lofty emotion that which is only 
an unreasoning passion, and clothing with the robes of duty 
what is only a superstition. This love of country, this pa- 
triotic ardor of ours, must submit to have philosophy in- 
vestigate her claims to rule above all other emotions, not in 
the interest of any less generous emotion, not to make men 
more sordid or selfish, but simply because there is a rule 
called Truth and a measure called Right, by which every 
human action is bound to be gauged, — because, though all 
gods and men and fiends should league all their forces, and 
link the golden chain to Olympus to draw its glory down to 
their purposes, they will only find themselves drawn up- 
wards, subject to its unchanging laws, the weak members 
hanging in the air and the vile ones hurled down to Tar- 
tarus. 

What is this country, — this mother country, this father- 
land, that we are bidden to love and serve and stand by at 
any risk and sacrifice? Is it the soil? the land? the plains 
and mountains and rivers ? the fields and forests and mines ? 
No doubt there is inspiration from this very earth, from 
that part of the globe which our nation holds, and which we 
call our country. Poets and orators have dwelt again and 



1 1 

again on the. undying attractions of our own land, no mat- 
ter what it is like, — the Dutch marshes, the Swiss moun- 
tains, soft Italy, and stern Spain, equally clutching on the 
hearts of their people with a resistless chain. But a land is 
nothing without the men. The very same countries whose 
scenery, tame or bold, charming or awful, has been the in- 
spiration to gallant generations, may, as the wheel of time 
turns, fall to indolent savages, listless slaves, or sordid 
money-getters. Byron has told us this in lines which the 
men of his own time felt were instinct with creative genius, 
but which the taste of the day rejects for distorted thoughts 
in distorted verse : — 

1 ' Clime of the unf orgotten brave ! 
Whose land, from plain to mountain cave, 
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave ! 
Shrine of the mighty ! can it be 
That this is all remains of thee ? 
Approach, thou craven, crouching slave ! 

Say, is not this Thermopylae ? 
These waters blue, that round you lave, 

O servile offspring of the free, — 
Pronounce what sea, what shore is this ? 

The gulf, the rock of Salamis ! 

" 'Twere long to tell and sad to trace 
Each step from splendor to disgrace. 
Enough, no foreign foe could quell 
Thy soul till from itself it fell ! 
Yes : self-abasement paved a way 
To villian bonds and despot sway.'' 

'It is the nation, not the land, which makes the patriot. If 
the nation degenerate, the land becomes only a monument, 
not a dwelling. Let the nation rouse itself, and the country 
may be a palace and a temple once more. * 

But who are the men that make the nation? Are they 
the whole of the population or a part only? Are they one 
party only among the people, which is ready perhaps to 
regard the other party not as countrymen, but as aliens? 
Is the country the men who govern her and control her 
destinies, — the king, the nobles, the popular representatives, 
the delegates to whom power is transmitted when the peo- 



12 



pie resign it? Once the king was the nation, with perhaps 
a few counsellors : patriotism meant loyalty to the sovereign. 
Every man who on any pretext arrayed himself against the 
crown was a disloyal rebel, an unpatriotic traitor, until at 
length God for his own purposes saw T fit to array Charles I. 
against the people of England, when, after years of civil 
war, and twice as many years of hollow peace, and five 
times as many years when discussion w r as stifled or put 
aside, the w r orld came to recognize that loyalty to one's king 
and love to one's country are as different in their nature as 
the light of a lamp and the light of the sun. 

And yet, if a king understands the spirit and heart of his 
nation, he may lead it so truly in peace or in war that love 
of country shall be inseparable from devotion to the sov- 
ereign. Modern historians may load their pages as they 
please with revelations of the meanness, the falsehood, the 
waywardness of Queen Elizabeth; yet England believed in 
her and loved her, and if England rose from ruin to pros- 
perity in her reign, it was because her people trusted her 
In her day, as for two centuries before, Scotland, where 
three different races had been welded together by Bruce to 
produce the most patriotic of peoples, had scarcely a true 
national existence, certainly nothing that men could cling 
to with affection and pride, because kings and commons 
were alike the prey of a poor, proud, selfish nobility, who 
suffered nobody to rule, scarcely to live, but themselves ; ex- 
empting themselves from the laws which they forced upon 
their country. 

An American cries out at the idea of a limited aristocracy, 
seeking to drag the force and affection of a nation of vas- 
sals, and calling that patriotism. Then what will he say 
to the patriotism of some of those lands which have made 
their national name ring through the world for the triumphs 
and the sacrifices of which it is the emblem? What was 
Sparta? What was Venice? What was Bern? What was 
Poland? Merely the fields where the most exclusive aris- 
tocracies won name and fame and wealth and territory only 



to sink their unrecognized subject citizens lower every year 
in the scale of true nationality. Not one of these identified the 
nation with the people. Or does an American insist on a dem- 
ocracy, where the entire people's voice speaks through rulers 
of its choosing? Does he prefer the patriotism of Athens, 
where thirty thousand democrats kept up an interminable 
feud with ten thousand conservatives, one ever plunging the 
city into rash expeditions, the other, as soon as its wealth 
gave it the upper hand, disfranchising, exiling, killing the 
majority of the people, because it could hire stronger arms 
to crush superior numbers ? What was the patriotism of the 
Italian cities when faction alternately banished faction, 
when Dante suffered no more than he would have inflicted, 
had his side got the upper hand ? What was the patriotism 
in either Greece or Italy, which confined itself to its own 
city, and where city enjoyed far more fighting against city 
than ever thinking of union to save the common race from 
bondage? For years, for centuries, for ages, the nations 
that would most eagerly repeat such sentiments as Cicero's 
about love of country never dreamed of using the word in 
any sense that a philosopher — nay, that a plain, truth-telling 
man — could not convict at once of meanness and contradic- 
tion. 

But we of modern times look back with pity and contempt 
on those benighted ages who had not discovered the great 
arcanum of representative government, whereby a free na- 
tion chooses the men to whom it entrusts its concerns, — 
its presidents and its prime ministers/ its parliaments and 
congresses and courts. Yet even this mighty discovery, 
whereby modern nations are raised so far above those poor 
Old World creatures, the Greeks and Romans and me- 
diaeval Italians, has not so far controlled factional passion 
that many countries do not live in a perpetual civil war 
which Athens and Corinth would have been ashamed of. We 
all know how our dear sister republics of Central and South- 
ern America, which, as Mr. Webster said, looked to the 
great Northern Light in forming their constitutions, treat 



14 

their elections as merely indications which of two parties- 
shall be set up to be knocked down by rifles and bombshells 
unless it retains its hold by such means. But how with our- 
selves? How with England? How with France? How 
often do we regard our elected governors as really standing 
for the whole nation and deserving its allegiance ? 

In 1846 the President of the United States and his coun- 
sellors hurried us into a needless, a bullying, a wicked war. 
Fully a quarter of the country felt it was an outrage, and 
nothing else. But appeals were made to stand by the gov- 
ernment, against which our own merciless satirist directed 
the lines which must have forever tingled in the ears and 
the consciences of the men who supported what they knew 
was irretrievably wicked : — 

11 The side of our country must alius be took, 

And President Polk, you know, he is our country ; 
And the angel who writes all our sins in a book 
Puts the debit to him and to us the percontry." 

Xo, brethren! no president, no prime minister, no cabinet, 
no congress, or parliament, no deftly organized representa- 
tive or executive body, is or can be our country. To pay 
them a patriot's affectionate allegiance is as illogical as 
loyalty to James II. or to the French National Convention. 
Mere obedience to law, when duly enacted, is one thing : So- 
crates may drink the hemlock rather than run away from 
the doom to which a court of his native city has consigned 
him; but, when the tribunals of that country perpetrated 
such mockery of justice, Plato and Xenophon were right in 
cherishing to their dying day a poignant sense of outrage, 
an implacable grudge, against such a step-mother as blood- 
stained Athens. 

But sometimes the voice of the whole people speaks un- 
mistakably; its ruler is the true agent and representative of 
a united and determined people. The will of the nation is 
unquestioned. Who are you, who am I, that we should dis- 
pute it, and think ourselves wiser and better than all our 
countrymen? Is not the whole nation the mother, whom ta 



l 5 

disobey is the highest sin? No, the particular set of men 
who make up the nation at any time will die and pass away, 
and what will their sons think of what they made their 
country do? 

In 1854 the Emperor Nicholas, whose thoughts were 
never far from Constantinople, picked an unintelligible 
quarrel with the sultan of Turkey. The unprincipled ad- 
venturer, who contrived to add new stains to the name of 
Xapoleon Bonaparte, saw his chance to win glory for the 
Gallic eagle. He plunged into war, and entrapped England 
into it with him. The wase old statesman who w r as at the 
head of the English government knew the war was need- 
less and wrong. He did his utmost to stop it ; but his coun- 
trymen preferred to listen to the reckless Palmerston, and 
they lashed first themselves and then Aberdeen into w r ar. 
The whole nation w r ent mad. John Bright told them the 
philosophic, the political, the Christian truth ; and Palmer- 
ston insulted him on the floor of the House of Commons. 
Two years w^ere consumed in the costly and pestilential siege 
of Sebastopol. A hollow^ peace was patched up, of wdiich 
the only significant article was, after a short interval, im- 
pudently broken by Russia ; the unspeakable Turk w r as given 
another thirty years' lease of life. And now I do not be- 
lieve there is one grown man in England among the sons 
and grandsons of those w T ho fought the Crimean War who 
does not believe Aberdeen and Bright w r ere right, that Palm- 
erston and England were wrong, and that the war was a 
national blunder, a national sin, a national crime. When 
John Bright stood almost against the whole nation, he was 
neither self-conceited nor unpatriotic, but a great and good 
man speaking as the prophet of God. 

Yes, a whole people may be wrong, and deserve, at best, 
the pity of a real patriot rather than his active love. Our 
country is something more than the single procession which 
passes across its borders in one generation: it means the 
land with all its people in all their periods; the ancestors 
whose exertions made us what w^e are, and whose memory is 



i6 

precious to us; the posterity to whom we are to transmit 
what we prize, unstained, as we received it. And he who 
loves his country truly and serves her rightly must act and 
speak, not for the present generation alone, but for all that 
rightly live, every event in whose history is inseparable from 
every other. If we pray, as does the seal of Boston, that 
"God will be to us as he was to the fathers/' then we must 
be to God what our fathers were. 

But, after philosophy has forced the vociferous patriot to 
define what he means by his country, she has a yet more 
searching question to ask : What will you do and what will 
you suffer for this country you love ? How shall your love 
be shown? There is one of the old Greek maxims which 
says in four words of that divine language what a modern 
tongue can scarcely stammer in four times four : "Sparta is 
thine allotted home ; make her a home of order and beauty.' ' 
Whatever our country needs to make her perfect, that she 
calls on us to do. I have run over to you some of the great 
sacrifices and great exertions which patriots have made to 
make their dear home perfect, and themselves perfect for 
her sake. But everything done or renounced to make her 
perfect must recognize that she is not perfect yet ; and what 
our country chiefly calls on us for is not mighty exertions 
and sacrifices, but those particular ones, small or great, which 
shall do her real good, and not harm. That her commerce 
should whiten every sea; that her soil should yield freely 
vegetable and mineral wealth; that she should be dotted 
with peaceful homes, the abode of virtue and love; that her 
cities should be adorned with all that is glorious in art ; that 
famine and poverty and plague and crime should be fought 
with all the united energy of head and hand and heart ; that 
historians and poets and orators should continue to make 
her high achievements and mighty aims known to all her 
children and to the world ; that the oppressed of every land 
may find a refuge within her borders ; that she may stand 
before her sister nations indeed a sister, loved and honored, 
— these are the commonplaces, tedious, if noble to recount, 



of what patriotism has sought to do in many ages. Yet in 

every one of these things, when actually achieved, there has 
often been a worm at the core of the showy fruit, which has 
made their mighty authors but little better than magnificent 
traitors. 

For everv one of these has often been achieved at the ex- 
pense of other nations as ancient, as glorious, as dear to 
their own children, as worthy of patriotic love as their tri- 
umphant antagonist ; and every one has been achieved at 
the still worse price of corruption and tyranny at home. 
Every country has in times mistaken material for moral 
wealth and has grown corrupt as she grew great ; and every 
country in time has fancied that she could not be great and 
honored while her sisters were great and honored too, and 
has gone to war with them, hoping to enlarge her borders at 
their expense and to gain by their loss. It is here, again, at 
this very point that the philosopher calls upon the patriot to 
say what he means by his cry, "Our country, right or 
wrong," the maxim of one who threw away an illustrious 
life in that worst of wicked encounters, a duel. If there 
are such words as right and wrong, and those words stand 
for eternal realities, why shall not a nation, why shall not 
her loving sons, be made to bow to the same law, — the utter- 
ance of God in history and in the heart? Can a king, can a 
president, can a congress, can a whole nation, by its pride 
or its passions, turn wrong into right, or what authority 
have they to trifle or shuffle with either? 

We are told that, if we ever find ourselves at war with 
another country, no matter how that war was brought on^ 
no matter what folly or wickedness broke the peace, no mat- 
ter how completely we might oppose and deprecate it up to 
the moment of its outbreak, no matter how as truthful his- 
torians we may condemn it after it is over, no matter how 
iniquitous or tyrannical our sense and our conscience tell us 
are the terms on which peace has been obtained, we ought, 
during the war. to be heartily and avowedly for it. "We 
must not desert the flag." Patriotism demands that we 



1.8 

should always stand by our country as against any other. 

And what are the patriots in our rival country to be doing 
the while ? Are they to support the war against us, whether 
they think it right or wrong? Are they cheerfully to pay 
all taxes? Are they to volunteer for every battle? Are 
they to carry on war to the knife or the last ditch? Is their 
love for their country to be as unreasoning, as purely a mat- 
ter of emotion, as ours? Certainly, if the doctrine of indis- 
criminate patriotism, "Our country, right or wrong/' is the 
true one. If France and Germany fight, no matter what, the 
cause, every Frenchman must desire to see Germany humili- 
ated, and every German to see France brought to her knees ; 
and it is absolutely their duty to have all cognizance o'f right 
and wrong swallowed up in passionate loyalty. Lord Aber- 
deen and Mr. Bright were right in deprecating the Crimean 
War up to the moment of its declaration : history says they 
were right now; but, while the war lasted, it was their duty 
to sacrifice their sense of right to help the government aims. 
Mr. Webster and Mr. Clay were right in pouring out their 
most scathing eloquence against the Mexican War : Gen- 
eral Grant was right in recording in his memoirs that he 
believed it unjust and unnecessary; yet Mr. Webster and 
Mr. Clay only fulfilled patriotic duty in sending their sons to 
die, one by the sword and one by the fever, in the same army 
where Grant did his duty by fighting against his conception 
of right. 

Brethren, I call this sentimental nonsense. It cannot be 
patriotic duty to say, up to 1846, that our country will be 
wrong if she fights, to say after 1849 that she was wrong 
in fighting, but to hold one's tongue and maintain her so- 
called cause in 1847 an d 1848, though we know it is wrong 
all along. And, observe, these patroits make no distinction 
between wars offensive and defensive, wars for aggression 
and conquest and wars for national existence. In any war, 
in all wars in which our country gets engaged, we must sup- 
port her : her honor demands that we shall not back out. 

O Honor! that terrible word, the very opposite of duty. 



19 

— unknown in that sense to the soldiers, the statesmen, the 
patriots of Greece and Rome ! Honor, the invention of the 
Gothic barbarians, which, more than any other one thing, 
has reduced poor Spain to her present low estate! There 
was a time when individual men talked about their honor, 
and stood up to be stabbed and shot at, whether right or 
wrong, to vindicate it. That infernal fiction, the honor of 
the duel, was on the point, sixty years ago, of drawing Ma- 
caulay into the field in defence of a few sarcastic paragraphs 
in a review, which, he admitted himself, were not to be jus- 
tified. It was very shortly after that that Prince Albert 
came to England, with his earnest, simple, modest charac- 
ter. He used all his influence to stop the practice and the 
very idea of duelling. And now all England recognizes that 
any and every duel is a sin, a crime, and a folly, and that 
the code of honor has no defence before God or man. When 
shall the day come when the nations feel the same about 
public war? When shall the words of our own poet find 
their true and deserved acceptance, not as poetical rhapsody, 
but as practical truth? — 

' ' Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 
Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
There were no need of arsenals and forts. 

11 The warrior's name should be a name abhorred ; 
And every nation that should lift again 
Its hand against its brother, on its forehead 
Should bear forevermore the curse of Cain." 

Brethren, if there is anything of which philosophy must 
say it is wrong, that thing is war. I do not mean any par- 
ticular school of philosophy, ancient or modern. Rut I 
mean, if any one studies the nature of God and man in the 
light of history, with a view to draw from that study rules 
of sound thought and maxims of right action, he must say 
war is wrong, an antiquated, blundering, criminal means of 
solving a national doubt by accepting the certainty of misery. 
I began my address with Cicero's definition of pa- 
triotism. I now recall to you his sentence wrung from the 



20 

heart of a man who had blazoned with his eloquence the 
fame of many great soldiers, and was not even himself with- 
out a spark of military ambition, when he found his fellow- 
citizens bent on war which must be fatal and could not be 
glorious : Quid ego praetermisi ant monitonim aut qaerel- 
arum, cam vel iniqaissimam pacem pistissimo hello ante- 
ferrem? "What did I omit in the way of warning and wail- 
ing, preferring as I did the most unfair peace to the justest 
war?" Granting — as I do not — that war is sometimes nec- 
essary, so cutting off a man's leg or extirpating an organ 
may be necessary; but it is always a horrible thing all the 
same. And just as the conservative surgery of our age is at 
work day and night to avoid these destructive operations, 
so the statesmanship of the day ought to be at work, not 
specifically to secure arbitration, as if that was anythingmore 
than a possible method, but to stop war, as an eternal shame, 
And granting war is sometimes necessary, if it is ever en- 
gaged in for any cause less than necessary, it is wrong; and 
the country is wrong that engages in it. A doubtful war, 
a war about which opinions are divided, is for that very 
reason not doubtfully evil; and the country that makes it 
is wrong. Yes, brethren, a nation may be in the wrong : in 
every w^ar one nation must be in the wrong, and generally 
both are; and if any country, yours or mine, is in the wrong, 
it is our duty as patriots to say so, and not support the coun- 
try we love in a wrong, because our countrymen have in- 
volved her in it. In the war of our Revolution, when Lord 
North had the king and virtually the country with him, Fox 
lamented that Howe had won the battle of Long Island, and 
wished he had lost it. What ! an Englishman wish an En- 
glish army to be defeated? Yes, because England was 
wrong; and Fox knew it, and said so. 

But there is a theory lately started, or rather an old one 
revived, that war is a good thing in itself; that it does a 
nation good to be fighting and killing the patriot sons of 
another nation, who love their country as we do ours. We 
are told that every strenuous man's life is a battle of some 



21 



kind, and that the virile character demands some physical 
belligerency. Yes. every man's life must be to a great ex- 
tent a fight; but this preposterous doctrine would make 
every man a prize-fighter. 

They say war elicits acts of heroism and self-sacrifice that 
the country does not know in the lethargy of peace. Hero- 
ism and self-sacrifice ! There are more heroic and sacrificial 
acts going on in the works of peace every day than the brazen 
throat of war could proclaim in a twelvemonth. The track 
of every practicing physician is marked by heroic disregard 
of life that Napoleon's Old Guard might envy. Every fire 
like that of Chicago, every flood like that of Johnstown, 
every plague and famine like that of India, are fields car- 
peted with the flowers of heroic self-sacrifice : they spring 
up from the very graves and ashes. And these flowers do 
not have grow up beside them the poisoned weeds of self- 
seeking or corruption, which are sure to precede, to attend, 
to follow every war. The dove of peace that brings the 
leaves of healing does not have trooping at her wings the 
vultures that treat their living soldiers like carrion. When 
Lucan has run throughout the catalogue of the national mis- 
eries that followed the quarrel of Caesar and Pompey, he 
winds them all up in the terrible words, multis utile belhtm, 
— "war profitable to many men." 

There is now much questioning of the propriety of capital 
punishment. It is strongly urged that the State has no right 
to take the life even of a hardened criminal, whose career 
has shown no trace of humanity or usefulness, and has put 
the capstone of murder on every other crime. And yet we 
are told it is perfectly right to take a young man of the 
highest promise, a blessing to all who knew him, the very 
man to live for his country, and send him to be cut down 
by a bullet or by dysentery in a cause he cannot approve. 

But there is a still newer theory come up about war as 
applied to ourselves. It seems that we share with a very 
few other people in the world a civilization so high and in- 
stitutions so divine that it is our duty and our destiny to go 



22 



about the globe swallowing up inferior peoples, and bestow- 
ing on them, whether they will or not, the blessings of the 
American — Constitution? Well, no ! Not of the American 
Constitution, but of the American dominion — and that, 
when we are once started on this work of absorption, they 
are rebels who do not accept these blessings. Now, if this 
precious doctrine be true, it utterly annihilates the old no- 
tion of patriotism and love of country ; for that notion called 
upon every nation, however small or weak or backward, to 
maintain to the death its independence against any other, 
however great or strong or progressive. According to this 
Mohammedan doctrine, this "death or the Koran" doctrine, 
the Finns and the Poles are not patriots because they object 
to being absorbed by Russia, and the Hamburgers were 
rebels for not accepting the beneficent incorporation into 
France graciously proffered to them by Marshal Davoust. 

But I will not enlarge upon this delicate subject of mod- 
ern Americanism. It is bad enough for the nations we 
threaten to absorb. It is worse for us, the absorbers. I 
will ask you to remember what befell a noble nation which 
took up the work of benevolently absorbing the world. 

When Xerxes had been driven back in tears to Persia, his 
rout released scores of Greek islands and cities in the love- 
liest of lands and seas and inhabited by the brightest and 
wisest of men. There is nothing in art or literature or 
science or government that did not take its rise from them. 
Their tyrant gone, they looked round for a protector. They 
saw that Athens was mighty on the sea, and they heard that 
she was just and generous to all who sought her citadel. 
And they put themselves, their ships and treasure, in the 
power of Athens, to use them as she would for the common 
defence. And the league was scarcely formed, the Persian 
was but just crushed, when the islands began to find that 
protection meant subjection. They could not bear to think 
that they had only changed masters, even if Aristides him- 
self assigned their tribute; and some revolted. The re- 
bellion was put down ; Athens went on expanding ; she made 
her subject islands give money instead of ships, she transfer- 



23 

red the treasury to her own citadel, she spent the money of 
her allies in those marvellous adornments that have made 
her the crown of beauty for the world forever. Wider and 
wider did the empire of the Athenian democracy extend. 
Five armies fought her battles in a single year in five lands ; 
Persia and Egypt, as well as Sparta, feeling the valor of her 
soldiers. And the heart of Athens got drunk with glory, 
and the brain of Athens got crazed with power, and the roar 
of her boasting rose up to heaven joined with the wail of 
her deceived and trampled subjects. And one by one they 
turned and fell from her and joined their arms to her rival, 
who promised them independence ; and every fond and mad 
endeavor to retain her empire only sucked her deeper into 
the eddy of ruin, till at length she was brought to her knees 
before her rival and her victorious fleet and her impregnable 
walls were destroyed with the cry that now began the free- 
dom of Greece. 

It was only the beginning of new slavery. Enslaved by 
the faithless Sparta, who sold half the cities back to Persia, 
patching up once more a hollow r alliance with Athens; en- 
slaved by Macedonia, enslaved by Rome, enslaved by the 
Turks, — poor Greece holds at last what she calls her in- 
dependence under the protection of the great civilizing na- 
tions, who let her live because they cannot agree how to cut 
up her carcass if they slay her. 

Brethren, even as Athens began by protection and passed 
into tyranny, and then into ruin, ■so shall every nation be 
who interprets patriotism to mean that it is the only nation 
in the world, and that every other that stands in the way of 
what it chooses to call destiny must be crushed. Love your 
country, honor her, live for her, — if necessary, die for her; 
but remember that whatever you would call right or wrong 
in another country is right and wrong for her and for you, 
that right and truth and love to man and allegiance to God 
are above all patriotism, and that every citizen who sus- 
tains his country in her sins is responsible to humanity, to 
history, to philosophy, and to Him to whom all nations are 
as a drop in the bucket and the small dust on the balance. 



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